The Amazing Story of the Man Who Cycled from India to Europe for Love

by Per J Andersson

  He senses that Istanbul is a premonition of his future.

  So many domes and bridges, and so solidly built. In school, PK read about Tamerlane, the warlord who razed Delhi and executed large portions of the town’s male population. Was he Turkish? He was born near Samarkand, which is now part of the Soviet Union. Anyway, he only had one eye, PK thinks as he sits on a stool near the Blue Mosque, drinking a cold glass of salty ayran.

  He stays in a small budget hotel near Sirkeci, the railway station on the European side. There, he feels lonely and sad. He sits on his narrow bed in the eight-bed dorm room and reads his letters over and over again to remind himself that there are people in the world who care about him. He is surrounded by millions of people and yet he is so very small and so very alone. Everyone is on their way somewhere else, but he is stuck, spinning.

  He goes to the bank to cash a cheque given as payment for a picture. As he sits behind a desk waiting for the money, he takes out his sketchbook and a pencil – as habit dictates – and starts drawing one of the bankers. After a few minutes, a crowd has gathered around him. The staff stop what they are doing and join the circle.

  ‘It looks just like me!’ the banker laughs when he sees the portrait. ‘You are very talented, Mr Indian!’ and shows it to his colleagues.

  One of the women working at the bank would like to have her portrait done too. She is so beautiful and PK wants to capture her face. But he is nervous about drawing women, in case they take offence at the results. Men are more relaxed. No, he does not want to take the risk, they might throw him out. Especially with such a pretty face.

  ‘I’m sorry, I don’t have time,’ he says, bowing politely.

  Eager to get away, PK writes Best wishes! in a corner of the portrait, tears the paper from the pad and hands it to the banker. He wants to pay.

  ‘How much?’ he asks.

  ‘Whatever you like.’ This is PK’s standard response these days.

  He pays well, enough for PK to afford to eat out every day for at least a week.

  Feeling upbeat and flush with cash, he takes a taxi to Istiklal Avenue, a shopping street on the other side of the Bosphorus. He wants to buy a gift for Lotta. While in the taxi, he takes out his sketchbook and draws the driver as the car struggles up one of the city’s hills in its lowest gear. It only takes PK a few minutes to complete and he hands the picture to the driver as soon as they reach his destination. The driver’s sullen expression suddenly breaks and a smile bursts across his face. PK wonders for a moment if the man might be about to embrace him. Instead the driver refuses payment for the trip and invites PK to his home. PK accepts, because it means he can save a little more money for Europe.

  He wanders around the covered Grand Bazaar, which reminds him of the streets of Old Delhi, with its small shops and shelves crammed with spices, leather, gold and meerschaum pipes. The basic formula for a market, it has been the same since the beginning of time. Part trade, part theatre. Vendors pull and tug at his clothes, just like back home.

  He feels safe. The intrusiveness feels familiar.

  In Kabul, he bought leather shoes and a handbag for Lotta. Now he purchases a necklace with turquoise stones strung on a leather strap. Then he goes to The Pudding Shop, not a shop selling desserts but a café serving Turkish cuisine. It’s the preferred hangout for hippies at the beginning, or the end, of the road between East and West. He sits in the back of the oblong room and rereads the letters from Lotta and Linnea. Then he stares at the train ticket.

  At times he has felt as if this journey was going to last for all eternity. Pedal, hitchhike, bus and bike again. The near-death experiences. The muggy heat, the stubborn midday sun. Blisters have come and gone, his buttocks are now permanently numb, and his stomach is almost always crying with hunger. Even his head feels like a steaming, freshly baked sponge. The train ticket is a gift from heaven. The angels have sent it through their messenger on Earth, Linnea, via the international postal service.

  He almost cannot believe it is true. He will ride the train to Vienna. The last leg to Europe does not have to be done by bike.

  Europe, he thinks. He wonders if he’ll ever fit in.

  He looks around at essentially the same scene as the Indian Coffee House in Delhi: backpackers, just like him, and a bulletin board full of hastily written notes.

  VW van to India, we leave on Friday, one vacancy.

  Magic Bus London–Kathmandu. Five vacant seats.

  Has anyone found my Pentax Spot Matic?

  What should he do with his bicycle? Take it with him on the train? He tucks the ticket inside his waistband and decides to sell the bike and buy a new one in Vienna. He writes in his notebook: Steady modern men’s bicycle for sale, purchased in Tehran. Only twenty dollars! He tears out the page and pins it to the bulletin board.

  Istanbul – Vienna

  He gets off the train at Westbahnhof in Vienna. Is this what Europe looks like? Hefty houses, clean streets and neatly dressed people. A reserved calm. But somehow also strained. It is beautiful. A dreamscape. Like stepping out onto a stage in a puppet theatre. Vienna is a storybook.

  Linnea’s sister Silvia meets him at the station. Linnea, who so longed for PK and wrote such loving letters, left Vienna for India only two days ago. She waited and waited, but finally gave up, says Silvia. PK never came. Perhaps she thought he had turned around and gone back. And her hunger to return to India had overcome her.

  Silvia takes him to the family business, Gallery 10, located in the city centre. Silvia’s mother greets him, but also wrinkles her nose and pulls him into the bathroom in the back. There, a tall, old-fashioned bathtub on lion’s feet awaits. She fills it with steaming water and bath bubbles, tells him to undress and get in. He is shy, but she is insistent, so he strips naked. Only then does he realize how bad he smells, how filthy his clothes are lying on the floor and how wild his beard and hair have grown.

  He bathes and thinks of Europe. Its scent of soap. A far cry from Asia’s teeming dirt and kaleidoscopic quotidian life. His heart is more uncertain than ever. The damned worry begins to grow inside him again; he feels a long way from home now.

  He stays with Silvia and her boyfriend. An artist and his wheelchair-bound wife also live in the same apartment.

  Silvia tells PK about Europe. The truths of her own culture. She wants him to develop thick skin, to be prepared, not to be so naïve.

  ‘People aren’t as friendly here, not like in Asia. Europeans are individualists and think only of themselves,’ she says, adding that kind, gullible people get into trouble in Europe.

  ‘Watch out, Europeans are racists. You can get beaten at any moment just because you have dark skin,’ she continues, explaining in detail how he should greet people, initiate conversations and behave.

  PK is grateful for her good advice.

  She cares about me, he thinks, as Silvia pours her counsel over him.

  In just one week, he has learned a lot about the exotic, foreign culture of Europe.

  The artist in Silvia’s apartment smokes incessantly. He is kind but always drunk and his behaviour is erratic. One moment he is despondent, gloomy, the next he laughs, or is so overtaken by emotion that he pulls PK into his arms. One night he gets up, embraces PK and tells him that he is welcome to kiss his wife.

  ‘Be my guest,’ he says.

  But PK does not touch her. He does not dare. He does not want to. They do not know each other. They have only ever said hello. Why would he kiss a woman he does not know? Instead, he puts his palms together and bows, a humble gesture to the artist’s wheelchair-bound wife, and steps out into the chill of the spring rain.

  He walks the glistening, empty streets, along the Danube and towards the lush green of the Town Hall and city parks, thinking about the heat, the dust, the dirt and crowds of Delhi. And the freedom of Europe. It will take some time to get used to it.

  In Vienna, he looks up some of the people he met on the hippy trail. His notebook is full of the addresses of
fellow travellers who told him to make contact. He drinks tea with them, goes to beer halls with them, draws them. They pay handsomely and his travel funds grow.

  Now, he thinks, I’ll buy myself a nice, expensive bike with lots of gears and ride the last stretch towards my goal.

  ‘You can’t ride to Sweden,’ says Silvia.

  ‘Yes, I can,’ he insists.

  Silvia takes him to the Prater, where they walk under the shade of the horse chestnut trees on Hauptallee and ride the Ferris wheel. They take the metro to drab old cafés and drink coffee with whipped cream, travel by tram to gloomy basement restaurants enveloped in a thick fog of tobacco. They are friendly, these people, but why do they keep warning him about the realities of living in Europe? It is as if the kindness and ease of the trip so far have been replaced by stress, irritation and callousness. In Europe, rules not feelings prevail, he learns from these friends. Europeans are less humane than the rest of the world – is that what they mean? He struggles to comprehend it. Tries to believe them.

  ‘PK,’ they say, ‘you’re a good man, you make people good. But you can’t change Europe. In Europe, empathy is dying out. Fear is what drives people, not love.’

  Love? If they are so attached to rules and regulations, maybe they cannot believe in love? Did that mean Lotta was not really in love with him?

  He understands that Europe is hard. At the same time, here, his ideas come to life. He reflects, problematizes, twists the obvious, complicates. He has been swept on in a current of emotion but now he can feel the momentum slowing, becoming a narrower, slower stream. He has hit the riverbed. And now he is breaking through the surface, gasping in oxygen-rich, rational thoughts.

  Maybe Lotta does not want him any more?

  He lies in the guest room in Silvia’s apartment, sinking into the overly soft mattress and wrapped in the excessively thick duvet, and is beset with doubts. But somehow he is able to gather his strength to counter them. In the darkness he sees his mother. She is sitting on the floor beside the bed and watching him. She is the counterforce. In the flow of his dark memories, she is the small, bright spot. He falls asleep in her glow.

  Before he has time to buy a new bicycle, he meets the gallery owner, who introduces himself as Herr Manfred Scheer and tells PK he admires his determination.

  ‘To make a sacrifice for someone you love is a wonderful and enviable thing. Imagine if more people let themselves be guided by love,’ Herr Scheer thinks aloud. ‘The world would be a much more beautiful place,’ he continues, before telling PK he has something for him.

  They go into his office and the man hands PK an oblong envelope. He opens it and takes out a ticket. No, two tickets. Two train tickets.

  ‘It’s too much,’ PK says, wanting to pay for himself.

  The gallery owner refuses, but after some hesitation accepts two of PK’s artworks instead.

  Wien Westbahnhof–Copenhagen Central

  Copenhagen Central–Gothenburg Central

  Vienna – Passau

  He sits, slumped in the plush seat. The stuffing is so soft it feels as if he has no skeleton and is made only of soft tissue. He spent his childhood sleeping on a straw mat on the floor. In his rented room in New Delhi, he had only a bed with a mattress of thin, braided rope. The second-class carriages had only unreserved seats consisting of wooden benches. His bicycle, a hard, tautly sprung leather saddle; the buses in western Asia, unyielding, shiny padded vinyl seats. He was used to feeling his shoulder blades, tailbone and pelvis. He wants to know where his body ends and things begin. Sinking into something so utterly forgiving, with no resistance, feels unreal.

  Why do Europeans wrap their bodies in thick layers of pillows, feather cushions and mattresses? Is it the cold, or because they feel lost? Is it fear? Are they afraid of the hardness of their own bodies?

  Wien, Melk, Linz, Wels. European cities have peculiar, monosyllabic names.

  He is approaching yet another border. The train brakes, screeches to a halt. A damp smell of cold steel, burnt asbestos and wool affronts his nostrils. The corridor fills with uniformed men.

  The interior door is flung open.

  ‘Reispass, bitte!’

  He holds out his green Indian passport.

  The West German border guards flip back and forth through the pages of the exotic document. It is not every day they get to check an Indian passport in Passau.

  ‘Unmöglich, mein Herr. We are so sorry. Follow here!’ the man says in a mixture of German and English.

  PK is forced off the train and follows them to a room on the other side of the platform.

  ‘Scheisse,’ PK mumbles as he steps down from the train. Silvia taught him this useful word as he was leaving Vienna that morning.

  This is it, he thinks. They think he is an illegal immigrant coming to settle in their rich and beautiful country. He is going to take their jobs, steal their girls and be a burden on their society. Except that all he wants is to pass through; he has no interest in West Germany.

  They ask him to open his worn bag. Their eyes are hard, their expressions unmoving. They think he is carrying illegal goods. No discussion is to be had; they will lock him up for a few days while they organize his deportation back the thousands of miles he has come. They root around among his dirty clothes and find bicycle tubing and bundles of light blue aerogram letters tied together with a length of thin, grubby rope.

  ‘We will contact the Indian Embassy in West Germany and they will buy a ticket for you so you can go home again,’ says one of the officers as he lifts up a blue shirt and holds it at arm’s length between his thumb and index finger, as if it were contagious.

  PK’s grandfather used to say that if you use only two fingers to do your work, the results can only dissatisfy you. Of course, the shirt smelled bad: it had been a long time since he had been able to wash it. But the officer is clearly unhappy with his job; he is on autopilot. Or so his grandfather would have said had he been there.

  The officer unfolds a wrinkled newspaper article. It is written in English and has been torn from the Indian magazine Youth Times. At least so it says at the top of the page. He starts reading.

  ‘Oh, it says here he’s married.’

  Eight policemen gather around the brown Indian hippy with the long curly hair and the dirty bag. One of them unfolds one of the blue aerograms and reads. It is written by a woman, he gathers when he looks at the sender. He is satisfied that the Indian and the woman are more than just friends.

  ‘Yes, it seems so. He’s married,’ says the other man. ‘With a Swedish woman,’ he adds.

  ‘Her name is Lotta,’ says the officer with the newspaper article, who then folds it again.

  PK begins to tell the German passport police about his journey’s beginning, back in New Delhi, India, his homeland, and the bicycle ride through deserts and over mountains, across seven countries and two continents, all the hundreds of stops along the way to drink, eat and sleep in villages and towns. Despite the incredible hospitality he has encountered, he very nearly did not make it this far, he says. He switched to train travel in Istanbul and there are now only two countries remaining between him and—

  ‘Get to the point,’ one of the men interrupts.

  ‘I’m not smuggling drugs and I have no plans to settle in West Germany.’

  He sees the scepticism in their eyes and grows despondent. One of the officers says it’s time to call the Indian Embassy and arrange transportation. A police car will take him to a detention centre for illegal immigrants or perhaps directly to the airport in Munich for immediate departure. The police explain that West Germany cannot let everyone in who comes knocking on their door. Then he starts conferring in German with one of his colleagues. PK cannot understand, but he feels as if something is squeezing him around the chest. An evil force. He wails, weeps and moans.

  ‘You can’t stop me now! You can’t possibly be so heartless!’ PK complains in an ever louder falsetto.

  Everything is exploding
. His voice, his self-confidence, his conviction. He looks out the window and sees the train still standing on the tracks, waiting to continue north towards Munich. The green carriages are enveloped in a grey mist. A light rain is falling and he is cold.

  But Europeans are motivated by rules, not cries from the heart.

  The adventure has come to an end. Hope is lost. His future is shattered. All the dreams, all the longing, everything he has been fighting for, everything. All in vain!

  Up until this moment, he has been convinced that he would reach his destination eventually. Doubts had come but were driven away, faith has pushed him forward on his mad plan. But after the warnings of friends in Vienna, he is no longer so sure. And now: the officers in Passau, at the border station between Austria and West Germany, do not look happy.

  ‘Ein moment, bitte!’ says one of the officers, looking at him with an equally rehearsed expression, one designed to reveal no emotion or clue as to what he is thinking.

  PK tries to appear as newly in love as possible, but suspects the battle is lost. He prepares to take his bag, go to the waiting room and wait for the next train back to Vienna.

  The border guards look again at the letters from Lotta and the article from the Youth Times. The article is illustrated with a picture of PK, his cheek pressed against Lotta’s.

  ‘He’s telling the truth. He’s married,’ one of the border police says.